


Hold On

by Jen Hall (Greenlady)



Series: Twenty/Twenty [3]
Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 10:17:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13499872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greenlady/pseuds/Jen%20Hall
Summary: Starsky learns a few things about Hutch. This is another prequel to 'Ghost Car'.  Set after Starsky & Hutch graduate from the Academy.





	Hold On

God. We survived the police academy, thought Starsky. I supposed we could survive moving into our own apartment. He wasn’t entirely sure at this point, though. They both had friends with trucks, who would have been willing to work for beer. But Hutch had been strangely reluctant, and even more reluctant to explain why. Some sort of macho belief that they were big, strong men and could move themselves? Starsky couldn’t figure it out, but finally gave in and let Hutch have his own way. Over the last few months at the Academy, he’d found out this was best, for the most part. Starsky didn’t mind, because he’d been feeling no pain, what with Hutch in his bed and all.

Starsky had been feeling no pain until he started helping Hutch move his stuff from storage into their nice new apartment, that is. The stuff that Hutch had blithely described as ‘a few things’. Starsky needed to get Hutch into an interview room at Metro and grill him on his interpretation of ‘a few things’, because it most certainly was not Starsky’s interpretation. Before they became a team, before they began working together and filling out reports, Starsky needed to know what number of things indicated ‘a few’ to Hutch.

Okay. Hutch didn’t have that much furniture, granted. He didn’t have a lot of clothes. But the books! That was something else again. Who needed that many books? And the books were damned heavy, not cheap paperbacks. Starsky lugged one more box of books up the stairs to their second story apartment – thank God they’d taken this one and not that third story place down the street! – and dropped it on the floor beside Hutch, who was sitting down, damn him, sitting down and organizing the damned books into piles by one of his bookcases. One of his ten damned bookcases.

‘Listen, Babe!’ he told Hutch. ‘I love you more than life itself….’

‘That’s nice,’ said Hutch. ‘But….’

‘There is no but,’ said Starsky. ‘I’d die for you. I’d kill for you. I let you fuck me in the ass, and I’ve never let anyone do that before. But, okay, there is one but… I need a break from carrying books for you. What am I? Your high school boyfriend?’

‘No. I didn’t have a high school boyfriend.’

‘Were all the gay boys blind when you were in high school, or what?’

‘Or what,’ said Hutch. ‘I’ll go carry some books up myself. I didn’t mean for you to do all the heavy lifting. Just…just don’t disturb my piles, okay?’

‘On pain of death?’ said Starsky. ‘No problem. I wouldn’t touch that many books with a ten-foot pole.’

Hutch took off like he was fleeing the interview, thought Starsky. Okay, one more subject Hutch ‘didn’t want to discuss’, so to speak. Starsky could understand that. Everyone had topics they really didn’t want to talk about, including Starsky himself. He wasn’t all that excited about discussing his time in the army fighting in Afghanistan. But he was able to stipulate to the fact that he’d been in Afghanistan, with, ‘I don’t really want to talk about Afghanistan if you don’t mind darlin’ because it was a fuckin’ awful time so can we talk about something more cheerful like the Black Death?’ 

But Hutch just clammed up and fled the scene. God, he adored the man. He loved his mind, his body, his heart and his soul, and he worshipped his cock. Worshipped it on a regular basis. He’d only told the truth when he said Hutch was the first man he’d ever let put his cock in his ass, and he would be the last man, too, because no one else would ever touch him like that again. God knew he didn’t want to force Hutch to talk about painful subjects, but how could he avoid them if he didn’t know what the hell they were?

I’m a cop, thought Starsky. I’m going to be a detective. If I can’t figure this out…. He sat down by the latest pile of books, and without messing up Hutch’s organization, studied them a little. A lot of them looked like textbooks. One pile contained books with strange titles like ‘Chan Kom’ and ‘Homo Hierarchicus’. What the hell? A book at the bottom was entitled ‘Cultural Anthropology’. Okay, so maybe the entire pile had something to do with something called Anthropology? He could google the subject first chance he got, because right now he had nothing. 

He could hear Hutch stomping up the stairs and zipped back to sit innocently on the sofa. God, it was nice to sit down. The idiot had two boxes of books in his arms. ‘Macho, macho man. I’ve got to be a macho man!’ Starsky sang. ‘We could have rented a cart, but no, no….’

‘It’d been more trouble to pull it up the stairs,’ said Hutch.

‘Maybe,’ Starsky allowed. ‘But how would we know unless we tried?’

Hutch didn’t answer and left to get more damned books. ‘Almost done,’ he hollered back over his shoulder. Starsky wondered what he meant by ‘almost’, and was actually a little afraid to speculate.

Starsky eyed the new boxes with some trepidation. What would they contain? It said something about how mysterious his beautiful, sexy, adorable lover was that Starsky actually felt trepidation upon wondering what a box of his books contained. Was his life going to be a series of potential quicksand pits he had to look out for?

Damn him, thought Starsky. Take the bull by the horns and open him. He got to his feet with the same manufactured courage he’d used before a raid on a nest of terrorists in Afghanistan, and advanced upon a box of books. He tore off the tape and opened it. 

Okay. It contained books. No surprise there. Might as well start to empty the box. He could just tell Hutch he was trying to help if the man got mad. He pulled out books, and more books, and some kind of diploma, and…. And whoa! Some kind of diploma:

HARVARD UNIVERSITY at Cambridge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – what the hell? – something something something boards of overseers but Starsky’s eyes were blurring – have conferred on Kenneth Richard Hutchinson the degree of Bachelor of Arts, magnum cum laude in Anthropology. 

Okay, thought Starsky, it totally makes sense that a Harvard Graduate is living in my apartment and working with me at Bay City PD as a cop. 

He heard Hutch coming up the stairs again, but couldn’t really move this time. Hutch, Baby, he thought. What are you doing here with me, shining your beautiful beams of light on my otherwise dark and depressing life? Why aren’t you off doing the sort of things you were so obviously born to do, whatever they were?

Hutch dumped his new load of books on the floor. ‘Starsky?’ he said. 

Starsky looked up, held the diploma toward him. ‘Sorry, Babe,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry, I just thought I’d help.’

Hutch shrugged at the scary Harvard diploma so apologetically presented to him, as if it were nothing. ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘That was years ago. Why don’t we order a pizza or something? Or I could go pick one up….’

‘No!’ said Starsky. ‘We really need to talk…. Because you tell me nothing, that’s why, you son of a bitch. I know your name. I know you fuck like an angel. And now I know you graduated from Harvard. And that’s about it.’

‘What more do you need to know?’ asked Hutch in a voice mainly comprised of ice.

‘What more? What more? Hutch, you’re breaking my heart here. You’re killing me. What have I done? Why don’t you even trust me with…don’t walk away, don’t leave me. Get the fuck back here, you bastard.’

‘I’m not leaving you. Are you leaving me?’

Starsky sank to the floor, his legs suddenly weak. ‘Leaving you? Jesus Christ, Hutch, I couldn’t leave you to save my life, even though I feel like I’m dying right now. If there’s shit you don’t want to talk about, just fucking tell me. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done. I don’t care if you’re fucking Adolf Hitler reborn. Just, please please please don’t change the subject or walk away when I ask a simple question.’

Hutch came and sat beside him on the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘Well, you do. You are. Whether you mean to do it or not. I’m not leaving you. I don’t want to change your entire personality. Just please, let me know what you want from me. Let me know what I can ask you. Let me know….’

Hutch pulled him into his arms and let him cry and didn’t look at him like he was pond scum. That was something, at least. Starsky reached for Hutch’s fly, and tried to unzip it, ready to offer sex if that made his beautiful lover less… whatever his beautiful lover was at the moment. 

Hutch stilled Starsky’s seeking hand. ‘It’s okay,’ he whispered. ‘Not right now. Not like this. We’ll have tons of makeup sex later, if you like, if we need to. Listen, we’re both tired and hot and hungry. Let me lock the car door. I left it open.’

‘Yeah, and it would be so terrible if someone stole some of your books.’

‘Yeah, it would. I can go shopping, or we can order….’

‘We are ordering a pizza. You are going nowhere except to lock the car door.’

‘Right. If you say so.’

‘I do say so. I’ll shoot you if you try to leave.’

Hutch sensibly ignored this proclamation and ran down to lock the car.

Starsky looked around at the five million books spread out over their apartment floor. This is what I deserve for just letting Hutch have his own way on almost everything the last few months, he thought. It had seemed best at the time. But now he thinks I’m a pushover, and I need to correct that misunderstanding. No more Mister Nice Guy. You are going to come clean, you miserable, slithering perp.

He picked up the phone and ordered a pizza, with all the trimmings and tons of cheese. A big bottle of Coke and some doughnuts, too. Hutch came back in time to hear Starsky order the last few items and glared a bit, but Starsky ignored him.

‘Okay,’ said Starsky. ‘Sit!’

‘Woof!’ said Hutch.

‘Quit changing the fucking subject.’ Starsky managed to not scream this demand by an enormous force of will he hadn’t known he possessed. ‘Tell me what I’ve done to make you hate me so much.’

‘Hate you? I don’t hate you, I love you.’

‘Prove it.’

Hutch sank down at his feet and put his head in Starsky’s lap. 

‘That won’t work either,’ said Starsky, through a tight throat because it might.

‘My head hurts.’

‘Hutch.’

‘It does, that’s not an excuse. There are things… things I don’t remember.’

‘Don’t pull some kind of amnesia shit on me, Officer Hutchinson.’

‘Not amnesia. Things I don’t remember.’

Starsky was silent for a long moment, putting two and two together and getting a hundred. ‘PTSD?’ he speculated.

‘I guess,’ said Hutch. ‘What you said earlier, about high school boyfriends. I didn’t have a boyfriend in high school. I fell in love with a boy, and let that be obvious, and he told people, and….’

‘Tell me who it was, and I’ll kill him,’ said Starsky.

‘My parents threw me out of the house.’

‘I’ll kill them too.’

‘I was out on the streets at 15, and….’

‘You were hooking?’

‘Yes,’ said Hutch in a small voice.

‘I’ll kill every man who touched you.’

‘Is that your answer to everything?’

‘It’s my answer to everyone and everything that hurts you. But… what in all this was so awful that you don’t remember?’

‘That’s the point, Starsky. I can’t remember. My parents tracked me down, I think. They sent me to some kind of camp, I think. I only have vague memories, but then I couldn’t seem to fight any longer. They took me home, and I did everything they told me. I dated girls, I did everything to appear normal, as they defined it.’

‘You went to Harvard?’

‘Yes. They paid for my education, and it was good there, but they kept tabs on me, made sure I dated girls and… and I got married.’

‘You’re married? Okay. No one’s perfect.’

‘Divorced.’

‘That’s better.’ Their doorbell rang. ‘That’s probably the pizza,’ said Starsky. ‘Don’t you dare move. This interrogation isn’t over.’

‘Yes, Officer Starsky.’

‘Oh, what a sweet sound that is,’ Starsky observed. He went to get the pizza, and Coke and doughnuts. ‘I’m starved. Move over, Babe.’ He put down the box of pizza on the bare floor between them. Cut out a slice of pizza for Hutch and put it on a paper napkin. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Eat and talk. I’m good at listening to you talk with your mouth full.’

He took a slice for himself, and leaned back against the sofa, looking at Hutch expectantly.

‘There’s not much more to tell,’ Hutch began.

‘Tell,’ Starsky ordered. 

‘I got married, got divorced, graduated from Harvard.’

‘Magnum cum laude in Anthropology.’

‘Yes, and moved out here to go to cop school.’

‘Why?’

‘It sounded like a good idea at the time.’

‘Cut. Out. The. Shit.’

‘I’m serious. I want to do good in the world, Starsky. I want to help our people. LGBTQ people. I want to fight against the shit that got dumped on me. I need to, Starsky.’

‘That’s better,’ said Starsky. ‘So do I. But there’s still holes in your story.’

‘Yes, because I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s like parts of my mind were wiped. And the lies… My parents told me I’d been arrested for hooking and doing drugs, and they’d protect me if I did everything they said. But after I graduated, I tried to check on what my charges were, and there was no record at all. Not even a sealed one because I was an adolescent at the time. Later they admitted they’d lied. But they wouldn’t answer my questions.’

‘I’ll kill them,’ said Starsky.

‘Please don’t. I don’t care about them, but I need you.’

‘Well, that’s an enormous admission,’ said Starsky. ‘What did you think would happen if you told me all this before?’

‘I didn’t think anything,’ said Hutch. ‘I wanted to forget all that and get on with my life.’

Starsky sighed and put his head in his hands. ‘You have been killing me lately,’ he said. ‘And you thought nothing of it?’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ he said.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the drugstore. Straighten out those books and pull that mattress over by the fireplace, okay, Officer Beautiful? I’m going to get some Presto Logs, and some lube, and a bottle of wine.’

‘Why? Are we going to have sex, or something?’

‘No. Whatever gave you that idea?’


End file.
